“I waited, and about four o’clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out the light.”

Light is a recurring symbol of Daisy’s and Gatsby’s relationship, most notably in the case of the green light at the end of the Buchanan dock.

Gatsby himself is often surrounded by images of light: his house glows brilliantly and his car seems to reflect “a dozen suns.”

The signal of turning the light off and on again if Tom gets violent, a plan of Gatsby’s design, suggests that Gatsby is desperate, in his tragically naive way, to see the afternoon’s events as but a blip in their happiness.

When Daisy turns out the light here, she is rejecting Gatsby for good. The fact that the incident occurs at four in the morning makes it all the more harrowing.